Import C300 footage without audio conforming?

[Bob Drummond]

Hi all. Using CS5.

I have hundreds of newly acquired clips shot with a Canon C300. I believe the C300 records audio in uncompressed PCM 16-Bit 48 kHz. I believe that format is natively supported in Premiere. Yet when I import the footage, Premiere begins conforming all the audio files. Is there a way around this? Am I doing something wrong?

[Ann Bens]

If your seqeunce does not match the sample rate it will conform even though its uncompressed.

[Bob Drummond]

Thanks, but my sequence does match the footage, as best I can tell. Even if I have NO sequence, and I import the clips, it starts conforming.

[Bart Walczak]

Does it say "conforming", or "generating peak files" in the lower right corner?

You can turn off generating peak files in the preferences, although I'm not sure the waveforms will be visible in the timeline then. Peak files are generated for each audio files so that Premiere does not have to read the whole file to draw a waveform.

[Roger Averdahl]

Originally Posted by Bob Drummond

Yet when I import the footage, Premiere begins conforming all the audio files. Is there a way around this? Am I doing something wrong?

If you place the MXF-files in a separte folder you can avoid conforming and only have the peak files generated. That will save time.

Use Canon XF Utility to export your MXF-files to a folder. Use the Merge Each Clip option if you have spanned clips. Try it with one card for testing purposes to see if it helps you.

Today files from the C300 is handled by the ImporterMPEG. If you place the MXF-files in one folder, outside from the cameras folder structure, the files are handled by the ImporterXDCAM. When the files are handled by the ImporterXDCAM no conforming is required.

It may not be the optimal workflow/media management but to get rid of conforming it works. Conforming files from the XF100/XF300/C300 takes very long time in Premiere Pro.

I am not 100% sure that it will work if the files are recorded with PCM audio.

Conforming is not tied to Sequence Settings.

[Bob Drummond]

Originally Posted by Roger Averdahl

If you place the MXF-files in a separte folder you can avoid conforming and only have the peak files generated. That will save time.

Use Canon XF Utility to export your MXF-files to a folder. Use the Merge Each Clip option if you have spanned clips. Try it with one card for testing purposes to see if it helps you....

Thanks Roger, but that didn't work either. I copied an MXF file to a random new folder, imported into premiere, but Premiere still conforms and creates a .CFA file.

I'm not using the canon XF utility. I never have. I just copy the cards wholesale to a hard drive, and use windows search feature to find all the MXF's at once, and import those into Premiere.

Would using the XF utility initially help at all, do you think?

[Roger Averdahl]

Originally Posted by Bob Drummond

Thanks Roger, but that didn't work either. I copied an MXF file to a random new folder, imported into premiere, but Premiere still conforms and creates a .CFA file.

I'm not using the canon XF utility. I never have. I just copy the cards wholesale to a hard drive, and use windows search feature to find all the MXF's at once, and import those into Premiere.

Would using the XF utility initially help at all, do you think?

I know that it works CS6 but am unsure about earlier versions.

[David Trayers]

Roger is exactly right. When I bring in the files from my XF100, I copy the folder structure intact from the cards to an archive drive, then I copy *JUST THE MXF* files to a work drive on my system. I then import all the clips as separate files. Premiere does NOT see them as a single clip once you drop the folder structure and the supporting XML files.

When I do a multi cam edit, I select just the first clips from each of the cameras in the media browser (CTRL+Click), right click to do a multi cam sequence and it automatically aligns the clips by timecode. I can then select the remaining range of clips for each camera and add them to the respective tracks as a group. Everything lines up and no CFA files to deal with.